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Action, thus, is set towards contemplation and an object of
contemplation, so that even those whose life is in doing have
seeing as their object; what they have not been able to achieve
by the direct path, they hope to come at by the circuit.
Further: suppose they succeed; they desired a certain thing to
come about, not in order to be unaware of it but to know it, to
see it present before the mind: their success is the laying up of
a vision. We act for the sake of some good; this means not for
something to remain outside ourselves, not in order that we
possess nothing but that we may hold the good of the action. And
hold it, where? Where but in the mind?
Thus once more, action is brought back to contemplation: for
[mind or] Soul is a Reason-Principle and anything that one lays
up in the Soul can be no other than a Reason-Principle, a silent
thing, the more certainly such a principle as the impression made
is the deeper.
This vision achieved, the acting instinct pauses; the mind is
satisfied and seeks nothing further; the contemplation, in one so
conditioned, remains absorbed within as having acquired certainty
to rest upon. The brighter the certainty, the more tranquil is
the contemplation as having acquired the more perfect unity; and-
for now we come to the serious treatment of the subject-
In proportion to the truth with which the knowing faculty knows,
it comes to identification with the object of its knowledge.
As long as duality persists, the two lie apart, parallel as it
were to each other; there is a pair in which the two elements
remain strange to one another, as when Ideal-Principles laid up
in the mind or Soul remain idle.
Hence the Idea must not be left to lie outside but must be made
one identical thing with the soul of the novice so that he finds
it really his own.
The Soul, once domiciled within that Idea and brought to likeness
with it, becomes productive, active; what it always held by its
primary nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed,
so becoming, as it were, a new thing and, informed as it now is
by the purely intellectual, it sees [in its outgoing act] as a
stranger looking upon a strange world. It was, no doubt,
essentially a Reason-Principle, even an Intellectual Principle;
but its function is to see a [lower] realm which these do not
see.
For, it is a not a complete thing: it has a lack; it is
incomplete in regard to its Prior; yet it, also, has a tranquil
vision of what it produces. What it has once brought into being
it produces no more, for all its productiveness is determined by
this lack: it produces for the purpose of Contemplation, in the
desire of knowing all its content: when there is question of
practical things it adapts its content to the outside order.
The Soul has a greater content than Nature has and therefore it
is more tranquil; it is more nearly complete and therefore more
contemplative. It is, however, not perfect, and is all the more
eager to penetrate the object of contemplation, and it seeks the
vision that comes by observation. It leaves its native realm and
busies itself elsewhere; then it returns, and it possesses its
vision by means of that phase of itself from which it had parted.
The self-indwelling Soul inclines less to such experiences.
The Sage, then, is the man made over into a Reason-Principle: to
others he shows his act but in himself he is Vision: such a man
is already set, not merely in regard to exterior things but also
within himself, towards what is one and at rest: all his faculty
and life are inward-bent.
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